Lorenzo Valla

First published Thu May 14, 2009; substantive revision Mon May 22, 2017

Lorenzo Valla (c. 1406–1457) was one of the most important humanists
of his time. In his Elegantiae linguae Latinae, an advanced
handbook of Latin language and style, he gave the humanist program
some of its most trenchant and combative formulations, bringing the
study of Latin to an unprecedented level. He made numerous
contributions to classical scholarship. But he also used his vast
knowledge of the classical languages and their literatures as a tool
to criticize a wide range of ideas, theories, and established
practices. He famously exposed the Donation of Constantine—an
important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal
rule—as a forgery. He compared, for the first time, St. Jerome’s
translation of the Bible with the Greek text of the New Testament,
thereby laying the foundations of critical biblical scholarship. In
his
Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie (Re-ploughing of
Dialectic and Philosophy), also known as his Dialectics,
he attacked scholastic-Aristotelian thought from an essentially
linguistic point of view. Already highly controversial in his own
times, Valla’s works continue to provoke heated debate in modern
times.

Valla did not have an easy life. Equipped with a sharp and polemical
mind, an even sharper pen and a sense of self-importance verging on
the pathological, he made many enemies throughout his life. Born in
Rome in (most likely) 1406 to a family with ties to the papal curia,
Valla as a young man was already in close contact with some major
humanists working as papal secretaries such as Leonardo Bruni
(1370–1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). Another was his uncle
Melchior Scrivani, whom Valla had hoped to succeed after his death;
but opposition from Poggio and Antonio Loschi (1365/8–1441) must have
led the pope to refuse to employ him. Valla had criticized an elegy by
Loschi, and had also boldly favored Quintilian over Cicero in a
treatise which has long considered to be lost; but a lengthy anonymous
prefatory letter has recently been found and ascribed, convincingly,
to the young Valla (Pagliaroli 2008; it turns out not to be a
comparison between Cicero’s theory of rhetoric and Quintilian’s
handbook, as scholars have always assumed, but a comparison between a
declamation of Ps-Quintilian, Gladiator—the
declamations were considered to be the work of Quintilian in Valla’s
time—and one of Cicero’s orations, Pro Ligario.)
Valla’s Roman experience of humanist conversations found an outlet in
his dialogue De voluptate (On Pleasure), in which
the Christian concepts of charity and beatitude are identified with
hedonist pleasure, while the “Stoic” concept of virtue is
rejected (see below). Valla would later revise the dialogue and change
the names of the interlocutors, but his Epicurean-Christian position
remained the same.

Meanwhile he had moved to Pavia in 1431, stimulated by his friend
Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli, 1394–1471)—with whom he was
soon to quarrel—and had begun to teach rhetoric. He had to
flee Pavia, however, in 1433 after having aroused the anger of the
jurists. In a letter to a humanist jurist friend of his, Catone Sacco
(1394–1463), Valla had attacked the language of one of the lawyers’
main authorities, Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313–1357). After some
travelling, in 1435 Valla found employment at the court of Alfonso of
Aragon (1396–1458), who was trying to capture Naples. Though
complaining about the lack of time, books and fellow humanists, Valla
was immensely productive in this phase of his career. In 1439 he
finished the first version of his critique of scholastic
philosophy. Two years later he finished his
Elegantiae linguae Latinae, a manual for the correct use of
Latin syntax and vocabulary, which became a bestseller throughout
Europe. As a humanist in the court of a king who was fighting against
the pope, Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine, which
had served the papacy to claim worldly power, was a forgery. In the
same years he composed a dialogue on free will and began working on his
annotations to the standard Latin translation of the Bible, comparing
it with the Greek text of the New Testament. He also wrote a dialogue
On the Profession of the Religious (De professione
religiosorum), in which he attacked the vow of obedience and
asceticism taken by members of religious orders. Further, he worked on
the text of Livy, wrote a history of the deeds of Alfonso’s
father, and began re-reading and annotating Quintilian’s
Institutio oratoria (Education of the Orator) in a
manuscript which is still extant (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, lat. 7723). But Valla’s philological approach and his
penchant for quarreling made him enemies at the Aragonese court. After
his patron Alfonso had made peace with the pope in 1443, Valla’s
role as an anti-papal polemicist may have shrunk. His enemies took
advantage of the situation. The immediate occasion was Valla’s
denial of the apostolic origin of the Symbolum Apostolicum
(Apostle’s Creed). In a letter, now lost, to the Neapolitan
lawyers he argued that a passage from Gratian’s Decretum
that formed the basis of the belief in the apostolic origin of the
Creed was corrupt and needed emendation. Powerful men at the court
staged an inquisitorial trial to determine whether Valla’s works
contained heretical and heterodox opinions. In preparation for the
trial Valla wrote a self-defense (and later an “Apology”),
but was rescued from this perilous situation by the intervention of the
king. The whole affair must have fuelled Valla’s wish to return
to Rome. In 1447 he made peace with the pope and became an apostolic
scriptor (scribe), and later, in 1455, a papal secretary. In
these years he revised some of his earlier works such as the
Repastinatio and his notes on the New Testament, and
translated Thucydides and Herodotus into Latin; his work on Thucydides,
in particular, was to have an important impact on the study of this
difficult Greek author. Always an irascible man, he continued to engage
in quarrels and exchanged a series of invectives with his arch-enemy
Poggio. He died in 1457, still working on a second revision of his
Repastinatio (that is, the third version). He was buried in
the Lateran.

Valla’s impact on the humanist movement was long-lasting and
varied. His philological approach was developed by subsequent
generations of humanists, and found, arguably, its first systematic
expression in the work of Angelo Poliziano
(1454–1494). His Elegantiae was printed many times, either in
the original or in one of its many adaptations and abridgments made by
later scholars. A copy of his annotations on the New Testament was
found near Louvain by Erasmus (1467?–1534), who published it. Though
many theologians complained about his ignorance of theology, Luther
and Leibniz, each for his own reasons, found occasion to refer to
Valla’s dialogue on free will. Humanists found Valla’s criticisms of
Aristotelian-scholastic thought congenial, though not a few regarded
his style as too aggressive and polemical. And though some humanists
such as Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) and Johann Eck (1486–1543)
complained about Valla’s lack of philosophical acumen, his critique of
scholasticism has a place in the long transformation from medieval to
modern thought—in which humanism played an important though by
no means exclusive role.

In his Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie,
which is extant in three versions with slightly different titles,
Valla attacks what he sees as the foundations of
scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy and sets out to transform
Aristotelian dialectic. As the title of the first version clearly
indicates, he wants to “re-plough” the ground
traditionally covered by the Aristotelian scholastics. The
term repastinatio means not only “re-ploughing”
or “re-tilling” but also “cutting back” and
“weeding out.” Valla desires to weed out everything he
regards as barren and infertile in scholastic thought and to
re-cultivate the ground by sprinkling it with the fertile waters of
rhetoric and grammar. His use of
repastinatio indicates that he is setting out a program of
reform rather than of destruction, in spite of his often aggressive and
polemical tone. Book I is devoted mainly to metaphysics, but also
contains chapters on natural philosophy and moral philosophy, as well a
controversial chapter on the Trinity. In Books II and III Valla
discusses propositions and forms of argumentation such as the
syllogism.

His main concern in the first book is to simplify the
Aristotelian-scholastic apparatus. For Valla, the world consists of
things, simply called res. Things have qualities and do or
undergo things (which he refers to as “things”). Hence,
there are three basic categories: substance, quality, and action. At
the back of Valla’s mind are the grammatical categories of noun,
adjective, and verb; but in many places he points out that we cannot
assume that, for instance, an adjective always refer to a quality or a
verb to an action (Repastinatio, 134–156; 425–442). These three
categories are the only ones Valla admits; the other Aristotelian
categories of accidents such as place, time, relation and quantity can
all be reduced to quality or action. Here, too, grammar plays a
leading role in Valla’s thought. From a grammatical point of view,
qualities such as being a father, being in the classroom, or being
six-feet tall all tell us something about how a particular man is
qualified; and there is, consequently, no need to preserve the other
Aristotelian categories.

In reducing the categories to his triad of substance, quality, and
action, Valla does not seem to have in mind “realist”
philosophers who accepted the independent existence of entities such
as relations and quantities over and above individual things. Instead,
his aim is to show that many terms traditionally placed in other
categories, in fact, point to qualities or actions: linguistic usage
(loquendiconsuetudo) teaches us, for example, that quality is the
overarching category. Thus, to the question “of what kind”,
we often give answers containing quantitative expressions. Take, for
instance, the question: what sort of horse should I buy? It may be
answered: erect, tall, with a broad chest, and so on. Valla’s
reduction of the categories often assumes the form of grammatical
surveys of certain groups of words associated with a particular
category: thus, in his discussion of time, he studies words like
“day,” “year,” and a host of others; and his
discussion of quantitative words treats mathematical terms such as
line, point and circle. Of course, Valla does not deny that we can
speak of quantity or time or place. But the rich array of Latin terms
signify, in the final analysis, the qualities or actions of things, and
nothing exists apart from concrete things. (Substance is a shady
category for Valla, who says that he cannot give an example of it, much
as Locke was later to maintain that “a substance is something I
know not what”).

It is tempting to connect this lean ontology to that of William of
Ockham (c. 1287–1347). The interests, approach and arguments of the
two thinkers, however, differ considerably. Unlike Valla, Ockham does
not want to get rid of the system of categories. As long as one
realizes, Ockham says, that categories do not describe things in the
world but categorize
terms by which we signify real substances or real inhering
qualities in different ways, the categories can be maintained and the
specific features of, for example, relational or quantitative terms can
be explored. Thus, Ockham’s rejection of a realist interpretation
of the categories is accompanied by a wish to defend the
categories as distinct groups of terms. Valla, on the other hand, sees
the categories as summing up the real aspects of things: hence, there
are only substances, qualities, and actions, and his reductive program
consists in showing that we have a vast and rich vocabulary in Latin
that we can use for referring to these things. His questions about
words and classes of words are not unlike those of Priscian (fl.
500–530) and other grammarians. (Priscian, for instance, had stated
that a noun signifies substance plus quality, and pronouns substance
without quality.)

Another good example of Valla’s reduction of scholastic terminology,
distinctions, and concepts is his critique of the transcendental
terms. According to Valla, the traditional six terms—“being,”
“thing,” “something,”
“one,” “true,” and “good”—should
be reduced to “thing” (Latin res) since
everything that exists, including a quality or an action of a thing
(also called a “thing”) is a thing. A good thing, for
example, is a thing, and so, too, is a true thing. Valla’s grammatical
approach is evident in his rejection of the scholastic
term ens. Just as “running” (currens)
can be resolved into “he who runs” (is qui
currit), so “being” (ens) can be resolved
into “that which is” (id quod est).
“That,” however, is nothing other than “that
thing” (eares); so we get as a result the
laborious formula: “that thing which is”. We do not,
however, need the phrase “that which is” (ea que
est): “a stone is a being” (lapis est ens),
or the equivalent phrase into which it can be resolved, “a stone
is a thing which is” (lapis est res que est), are
unclear, awkward, and absurd ways of saying simply that “a stone
is a thing” (lapis est res). Valla also rejects other
scholastic terms such as entitas
(“entity”), hecceitas (“this-ness”)
and quidditas (“quidity”) for grammatical
reasons: these terms do not conform to the rules of word formation in
Latin. While he is not against the introduction of new words for
things unknown in antiquity (e.g., bombarda for
“cannonball”), the terminology coined by the scholastics
is a different matter entirely.

Related to this analysis is Valla’s repudiation of what he presents as
the scholastic view of the distinction between abstract and concrete
terms, that is, the view that abstract terms (“whiteness,”
“fatherhood”) always refer solely to quality, while
concrete terms (“white,” “father”) refer to
both substance and quality (Repastinatio, 21–30). In a careful
discussion of this distinction, taking into account the grammatical
categories of case, number, and gender, Valla rejects the ontological
commitments which such a view seems to imply, and shows, on the basis
of a host of examples drawn from classical Latin usage, that abstract
terms often have the same meaning as their concrete counterparts
(useful/utility, true/truth, honest/honesty). These terms refer to the
concrete thing itself, that is, to the substance, its quality or
action (or a combination of these three components into which a thing
can be resolved). Again, Valla’s main concern is to study the workings
of language and how these relate to the world of everyday things, the
world that we see and experience.

In describing and analyzing this world of things Valla is not only
guided by grammatical considerations. He also uses “common
sense” and the limits of our imagination as yardsticks against
which to measure scholastic notions and definitions. He thus thinks
that it is ridiculous to imagine prime matter without any form or form
without any matter, or to define a line as that which has no width and
a point as an indivisible quantity that occupies no
space. Valla’s idea is that notions such as divisibility and
quantity are properly at home only in the world of ordinary
things. For him, there is only the world of bodies with actual shapes
and dimensions; lines and points are parts of these things, but only,
as he seems to suggest, in a derivative sense, in other words, as
places or spaces that are filled by the body or parts of that body. If
we want to measure or sketch a (part of a) body, we can select two
spots on it and measure the length between them by drawing points and
lines on paper or in our mind, a process through which these points
and lines become visible and divisible parts of our world
(Repastinatio, 142–147; 427–431). But it would be
wrong to abstract from this diagramming function and infer a world of
points and lines with their own particular quantity. They are merely
aids for measuring or outlining bodies. In modern parlance, Valla
seems to be saying that ontological questions about these
entities—do they exist? how do they exist?—amount to
category mistakes, equivalent to asking the color of virtue.

The appeal to common sense (or what Valla considers as such) informs
his critique of Aristotelian natural philosophy. He insists on
commonplace observations and experiences as criteria for testing ideas
and hypotheses. On this basis, many of Aristotle’s contentions, so
Valla argues, are not true to the facts (Repastinatio, 98–112). He
rejects or qualifies a number of fundamental tenets of Aristotelian
physics, for instance that movement is the cause of heat, that a
movement is always caused by another movement, that elements can be
transformed into one another, that each has its own proper qualities
(heat and dryness for fire, heat and humidity for air, etc.), that
there are pure elements, that the combination of heat and humidity is
a sufficient condition for the generation of life, and so forth. Valla
often uses reductio ad absurdum as an argumentative strategy:
if Aristotle’s theory is true, one would expect to observe phenomena
quite different from the ones we do, in fact, observe. In arguing, for
instance, for the existence of a fiery sphere below the moon,
Aristotle had claimed that “leaden missiles shot out by force
melt in the air” (De caelo II.7, 289a26–28). Valla
rejects this claim by appealing to ordinary experience: we never see
balls—whether leaden, iron, or stone, shot out of a sling or a
cannon—heat up in the air; nor do the feathers of arrows catch
fire. If movement is sufficient to produce heat, the spheres would set
the air beneath in motion; but no one has ever observed
this. Arguably, the importance of Valla’s polemic here is not so much
the quality of his arguments as the critical tendency they reveal, the
awareness that Aristotle’s conclusions often do not conform to daily
experience. While he does not develop his critique in the direction of
an alternative natural philosophy as later Renaissance philosophers
such as Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588) and Francesco Patrizi of Cherso
(1529–1597) would do, Valla contributed to undermining faith in the
exclusive validity of the Aristotelian paradigm.

Valla also criticizes Aristotle’s natural philosophy because,
according to him, it detracts from God’s power. In strongly polemical
terms, he attacks Aristotle for his “polytheistic” ideas
and for what Valla sees as his equation of God with nature
(Repastinatio, 54–59). Valla wants to reinstate God as
the sole creator of heaven and earth. To think of the cosmos in terms
of a living animal or the heavens in terms of celestial orbs moved by
intelligences is anathema to Valla (as it was to many medieval
scholastics as well). The notion of God as First Mover is also
rejected, since movement and rest are terms which should not be
applied (except perhaps metaphorically) to spiritual beings such as
God, angels, and souls.

Religious considerations also led Valla to find fault with another
fundamental tenet of Aristotelian scholastic thought: the Tree of
Porphyry (Repastinatio, 46–50; 389–391). Valla has several problems with
the Tree. First of all, it puts substance, rather than thing, on
top. For Valla, however, pure substance does not exist, since a thing
is always already a qualified substance. He also thinks that there is
no place for a human being in the Tree of Porphyry. Since the Tree
divides substance into the corporeal and the spiritual, it is
difficult to find a place for a human being, consisting of both soul
and body. Moreover, the Tree covers both the divine and the created
order, which leads to inappropriate descriptions of God and angels, to
which the term “animal” should not be applied, since they
do not have a body. Valla, therefore, divides Porphyry’s Tree into
three different trees: one for spiritual substance, one for corporeal
substance, and one for what he calls “animal,” that is,
those creatures which consist of both body and soul (Repastinatio,
49–50; 422–424). One might argue that what Valla gains over Porphyry
by disentangling the supernatural from the natural order, he loses by
having to admit that he cannot place Christ in any of his three trees,
since he is not only human but also God.

The soul as an incorporeal substance is treated by Valla in a separate
chapter (Repastinatio, 59–73; 408–410; 418–419). Rejecting the
Aristotelian hylomorphic account, he returns to an Augustinian picture
of the soul as a wholly spiritual and immaterial substance made in the
image of God, and consisting of memory, intellect, and will. He
rejects without much discussion the various functions of the soul
(vegetative, sensitive, imaginative, intellectual), which would
entail, he thinks, a plurality of souls. He briefly treats the five
exterior senses but is not inclined to deal with the physiological
aspects of sensation. The term “species” (whether sensible
or intelligible) does not occur at all. The Aristotelian sensus
communis—which the medieval commentary tradition
on Deanima had viewed as one of the internal
senses, alongside imagination (sometimes distinguished
from phantasia), memory, and the vis aestimativa
(foresight and prudence)—is mentioned only to be rejected
without further argument (Repastinatio, 73). Imagination and the vis
aestimativa are absent from Valla’s account, while memory, as the
soul’s principal capacity, appears to have absorbed all the functions
which scholastics had divided among separate faculties of the
sensitive soul. What may have provoked Valla’s anger about the
traditional picture is the seemingly passive role allotted to the soul
in perception and knowledge: it seems to come only at the very end of
a long chain of transmission, which starts with outer objects and
concludes with a merely receptive tabula rasa. In his view,
the soul is far more noble than the hylomorphic account of Aristotle
implies, at least as Valla understands that account. He therefore
stresses on various occasions the soul’s dignified nature, its
immortality, unity, autonomy, and superiority to both the body and the
animal soul, comparing it to the sun’s central place in the
cosmos.

After Valla’s attack on what he calls the fundamenta
(foundations) of Aristotelian-scholastic metaphysics and natural
philosophy, he turns to dialectic in Books II and III of his
Repastinatio. For Valla, argumentation should be approached
from an oratorical rather than a logical point of view. What counts is
whether an argument works, which means whether it convinces
one’s adversary or public. The form of the argument is less
important. Dialectic is a species of confirmation and refutation; and,
as such, it is merely a component of invention, one of the five parts
of rhetoric (Repastinatio, 175; 447). Compared to rhetoric,
dialectic is an easy subject and does not require much time to master,
since it considers and uses only the syllogism “bare”, as
Valla puts it, that is, in isolation from its wider argumentative
context (Repastinatio, 175); its sole aim is to teach. The
rhetorician, on the other hand, uses not only the syllogism, but also
the enthymeme (incomplete syllogism), epicheireme (a kind of extended
reasoning) and example. The orator has to clothe everything in
persuasive arguments, since his task is not only to teach but also to
please and to move. This leads Valla to downplay the importance of the
Aristotelian syllogism and to consider forms of argumentation that are
not easily forced into its straightjacket. Among these are captious
forms of reasoning such as the dilemma, paradox, and heap argument
(sorites), and Valla offers a highly interesting analysis of
these forms in the last book of the Repastinatio.

Without rejecting the syllogism tout court, Valla is scathing
about its usefulness. He regards it as an artificial type of
reasoning, unfit to be employed by orators since it is does not
reflect the natural way of speaking and arguing. What is the use, for
example, of concluding that Socrates is an animal if one has already
stated that every man is an animal and that Socrates is a man? It is a
simple, puerile, and pedantic affair, hardly amounting to a
real ars (art). Valla’s treatment of the syllogism clearly
shows his oratorical perspective. Following Quintilian, he stresses
that the nature of syllogistic reasoning is to establish proof. One of
the two premises contains what is to be proven (que
probatur), and the other offers the proof (que probat),
while the conclusion gives the result of the proof—into which
the proof “goes down” (in quam probatio
descendit). It is not always necessary, therefore, to have a
fixed order (major, minor, conclusion). If it suits the occasion
better, we can just as well begin with the minor, or even with the
conclusion. The order is merely a matter of convention and custom
(Repastinatio, 282–286; 531–534).

These complaints about the artificiality of the syllogism inform
Valla’s discussion of the three figures of the syllogism. Aristotle
had proven the validity of the moods of Figure 2 and 3 by converting
them to four moods of Figure 1; and this was taught, for example, by
Peter of Spain (thirteenth century) in his widely read handbook on
logic, the
Summulae logicales, certainly consulted by Valla here. Valla
regards this whole business of converting terms and transposing
propositions in order to reduce a particular syllogism to one of these
four moods of Figure 1 as useless and absurd. While he does not
question the validity of these four moods, he believes that there are
many deviant syllogisms that are also valid, for instance: God is in
every place; Tartarus is a place; therefore, God is in Tartarus. Here
the “every” or “all” sign is added to the
predicate in the major proposition. He says, moreover, that an entirely
singular syllogism can be valid: Homer is the greatest of poets; this
man is the greatest of poets; therefore, this man is Homer. And he
gives many other examples of such deviant schemes. Valla thus
deliberately ignores the criteria employed by Aristotle and his
commentators—that at least one premise must be universal, and
at least one premise must be affirmative, and that if the conclusion is
to be negative, one premise must be negative—or, at any rate,
he thinks that they unnecessarily restrict the number of possible valid
figures.

In his discussion of the syllogism Valla does not refer to an
important principle employed by Aristotle and his
commentators: dici de omni et nullo (to be said/predicated
about all and about none). To quote Peter of Spain’s Summulae
logicales: “To be said of every [dici de
omni] is when there is nothing to to be taken under the subject
[nichil est sumere sub subiecto] of which the predicate may
not be said, like ‘every man runs’: here, running is said
of every man, and under man there is nothing to to be taken of which
running is not said. To be said of none [de nullo]
is when there is nothing to be taken under the subject from which the
predicate may not be eliminated, like ‘no man runs’: here,
running is eliminated from any man at all [quolibet
homine].” (Ed. L. M. de Rijk, Assen 1972, 43). As G. Leff
paraphrases Ockham: “it denotes that in a universal affirmation
the predicate can stand for everything for which the subject can
stand, and conversely for the dictum de nullo.”
(Leff, William of Ockham, Manchester 1975, 270 referring to
E. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham, London 1935,
214–215; cf. M. McCord Adams, William of Ockham, 2 vols.,
Notre Dame 1987, vol. I, 441.) This principle led Aristotle to
conclude that only four moods of the first figure were immediately
valid. That Valla does not make use of this fundamental condition is
understandable from his oratorical point of view, since it would be an
uninteresting or even irrelevant criterion of validity. It is
therefore not surprising that he thinks that we might as well
“reduce” the first figure to the second rather than vice
versa. Likewise, from his oratorical point of view, he can only treat
the third figure of the syllogism with contempt: it is a
“completely foolish” form of reasoning; no one reasons as
follows: every man is a substance; every man is an animal; therefore,
some animal is a substance. In a similar vein, he rejects the use of
letters in the study of syllogisms (Repastinatio, 297–300; 546–548).

Valla’s insistence on examining and assessing arguments in terms of
persuasion and usefulness leads him to criticize not only the
syllogism but also other less formal modes of argumentation. These
modes usually involve interrogation, resulting in an unexpected or
unwanted conclusion or an aporetic situation. Some scholars have
regarded Valla’s interest in these less formal or non-formal arguments
as an expression of a skeptical attitude towards the possibility of
certainty in knowledge in general. Others have raised serious doubts
about this interpretation. What we can say for sure, however, is that
Valla was one of the first to study and analyze the heap argument,
dilemma, and suchlike. The heap argument is supposed to induce doubts
about the possibility of determining precise limits, especially to
quantities. If I subtract one grain from a heap, is it still a heap?
Of course. What if I subtract two grains? And so forth, until the heap
consists of just one grain, which, to be sure, is an unacceptable
conclusion. It seems impossible to determine the exact moment when the
heap ceases to be a heap, and any attempt to determine this moment
seems to involve an ad hoc decision, for a heap does not cease to be a
heap due to the subtraction of just one single grain. Valla discusses
a number of similar cases, and comments on their fallacious
nature.

Dilemma, too, receives extensive treatment from him. This type of
argument had been widely studied in antiquity. The basic structure is
a disjunction of propositions, usually in the form of a double
question in an interrogation, which sets a trap for the respondent,
since whichever horn of the dilemma he chooses, he seems to be caught
up in a contradiction and will lose the debate (“If he is
modest, why should you accuse someone who is a good man? If he is bad,
why should you accuse someone who is unconcerned by such a
charge?”, Cicero,
De inventione 1.45.83, cited by Valla Repastinatio, 321). It was also
recognized that the respondent could often counter the dilemma by
duplicating the original argument and “turning it back”
(convertere) on the interrogator, using it as a kind of
boomerang (“if he is modest, you should accuse him because he
will be concerned by such a charge; if he is bad, you should also
accuse him because he is not a good man”). Alternatively, he
could escape the dilemma by questioning the disjunction and showing
that there is a third possibility. There were many variations of this
simple scheme, and it was studied from a logical as well as a
rhetorical point of view with considerable overlap between these two
perspectives.

In medieval times, dilemma does not seem to have attracted much
theoretical reflection, though there was an extensive literature on
related genres such as
insolubilia and paradoxes, which were generally treated in a
logical manner. It is, therefore, interesting to see Valla discussing a
whole range of examples of dilemma. The rhetoric textbook by the
Byzantine émigré George of Trebizond (1396–1486),
composed about 1433, was probably an important source for him. This
work might also have led Valla to explore the relevant places in
Quintilian, Cicero, the Greek text of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric and perhaps other Greek sources. The example Valla
discusses most extensively comes from Aulus Gellius and concerns a
lawsuit between Protagoras and his pupil Euathlus (Repastinatio, 312–319;
562–568. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 5.10.5–16). The pupil
has promised to pay the second installment of the fees as soon as he
has won his first case. He refuses to pay, however, and Protagoras
takes him to court. If Euathlus loses the case, he will have to pay the
rest of the fee, on account of the verdict of the judges; but if
Euathlus wins, he will also have to pay, this time on account of his
agreement with Protagoras. Euathlus, however, cleverly converts the
argument: in neither case will he have to pay, on account of the
court’s decision (if he wins), or on account of the agreement
with Protagoras (if he loses). Aulus Gellius thinks that the judges
should have refrained from passing judgment because any decision would
be inconsistent with itself. But Valla rejects such a rebuttal
(antistrephon or conversio) of the dilemma and thinks
that a response may be formulated as long as one concentrates on the
relevant aspects of the case. Briefly put, Valla says that Euathlus
cannot have it both ways and must choose one or the other alternative:
he must comply either with his agreement with Protagoras or with the
verdict passed by the judges. If they decide against Protagoras, he may
try to reclaim his money in a second lawsuit. At any rate, there is no
reason to despair; Aulus Gellius is, therefore, wrong in thinking that
the judges should have refrained from passing a judgment. In all such
cases, Valla argues, the conversion is not a rebuttal, but at best a
correction of the initial argument (a correction, however, is not a
refutation), and at worst a simple repetition or illegitimate shift of
the initial position.

An important way of seeing through deceptive arguments is to consider
the weight of words carefully, and Valla gives some further examples
of fallacies which can easily be refuted by examining the meaning and
usage of words and the contexts in which they occur (Repastinatio,
320–334; 568–578). He considers the fallacies “collected by
Aristotle in his
Sophistical Refutations as for the most part a puerile
art,” quoting the Rhetorica ad Herennium (2.11.16) to
the effect that “knowledge of ambiguities as taught by
dialecticians is of no help at all but rather a most serious
hindrance.” Valla is not interested in providing a comprehensive
list of deceptive arguments and errors or in studying rules for
resolving them. He does not mention, for example, the basic division
between linguistic (in dictione) and extra-linguistic
(extra dictionem) fallacies. In a letter to a friend, Valla
lists some “dialecticians”—Albert of Saxony (c.
1316–1390), Albert the Great (c. 1220–1280), Ralph Strode (fl.
1350–1400), William of Ockham, and Paul of Venice (c. 1369–1429)
—but there is no sign that he had done more than leaf through
their works on sophismata and insolubilia (Valla
1984, 201). The few examples he gives seem to come from Peter of
Spain’s Summulae logicales. Nor was it necessary to have
more than a superficial acquaintance with the works of these
dialecticians in order to realize that their approach differed vastly
from his. As he repeatedly states, what is required in order to
disambiguate fallacies is not a deeper knowledge of the rules of logic
but a recognition that arguments need to be evaluated within their
wider linguistic and argumentative context. Such an examination of how
words and arguments function will easily lay bare the artificial and
sophistical nature of these forms of argumentation.

This approach is also evident in Valla’s analysis of the proposition
of which a syllogism or argument consists. Propositions are
traditionally divided according to quantity (universal of particular)
and to quality (affirmative and negative). Quantity and quality are
indicated by words that are called signa (markers, signs):
“all,” “any,” “not,” “no
one,” and so forth. In Book II of the Repastinatio,
Valla considers a much wider range of words than the medieval
logicians, who had mainly worked with “all,”
“some,” “none,” and “no one”. To
some extent, his aim is not unlike that of the dialecticians whom he
so frequently attacks, that is, to study signs of quality and negation
and how they determine the scope of a proposition. But for him there
is only one proper method of carrying out such a study: examining
carefully the multifarious ways in which these words are used in
refined and grammatically correct Latin. Not surprisingly, Valla
criticizes the square of contraries—the fourfold
classification of statements in which the distinction between
universal and particular and that between affirmative and negative are
combined. A similar critique of the rather arbitrary restriction to a
limited set of words is applied to the scholastic notion of modality
(Valla Repastinatio, 237–244; 491–497). Scholastics usually treat only the following six terms as modals: “possible,”
“impossible,” “true,” “false,”
“necessary,” and “contingent.” Latin, however,
is much more resourceful in expressing modality. Using criteria such
as refinement and utility, Valla considers terms such as
“likely/unlikely,” “difficult/easy,”
“certain/uncertain,” “useful/useless,”
“becoming/unbecoming,” and
“honorable/dishonorable.” This amounts to introducing a
wholly new concept of modality, which comes close to an adverbial
qualification of a given action.

Valla’s principal bêtes noires are Aristotle, Boethius,
Porphyry, and Peter of Spain, but he also speaks in general terms of
the entire natio peripatetica (nation of Peripatetics). He
frequently refers to isti (those), a suitably vague label for
the scholastic followers of Aristotle—including both
dialecticians and theologians. It has often been claimed that Valla is
attacking late medieval scholasticism; but it must be said that he
does not quote any late medieval scholastic philosophers or
theologians. He generally steers clear of their questions, arguments,
and terminology. If we compare Valla’s Repastinatio with,
for example, Paul of Venice’s Logicaparva (The
Small Logic), we quickly perceive the immense difference in
attitude, argument, and approach. Moreover, as noted above, Valla’s
grammatical and oratorical approach is fundamentally different from
Ockham’s terminism. He probably thought that he did not need to engage
with the technical details of scholastic works. It was sufficient for
him to establish that there was a huge distance between his own
approach and that of the scholastics. Once he had shown that the
scholastic-Aristotelian edifice was built on shaky foundations, he did
not care to attack the superstructure, so to speak. And Valla proved
to his own satisfaction that these foundations were shaky by showing
that the terminology and vocabulary of the scholastics rested on a
misunderstanding of Latin and of the workings of language in
general. But even though his criticisms are mainly addressed to
Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry, his more general opinion of
Aristotelianism was, of course, formed by what he saw in his own time.
He loathed the philosophical establishment at the universities, their
methods, genres, and, above all, their style and terminology. He
thought that they were slavishly following Aristotle. In his view,
however, a true philosopher does not hesitate to re-assess any opinion
from whatever source; refusing to align himself with a sect or school,
he presents himself as a critical, independent thinker (Repastinatio,
1–8; 359–363). Whether scholasticism had, indeed, ossified by the time
Valla came on the scene is a matter of debate; but there is no
question that this is how he and the other humanists saw it.

The same critical spirit also infuses Valla’s work on moral
philosophy. In his dialogue, published as De voluptate in
1431, when he was still in his mid-twenties, and revised two years
later under the title De vero bono (On the True
Good), Valla presents a discussion between an
“Epicurean,” a “Stoic,” and a
“Christian” on an age-old question: what is the highest
ethical good? The result of this confrontation between pagan and
Christian moral thought is a combination of Pauline fideism and
Epicurean hedonism, in which the Christian concepts of charity and
beatitude are identified with hedonist pleasure, and the
“Stoic” concept of virtue is rejected (Valla, De vero falsoque bono).
Valla thus treats Epicureanism as a stepping-stone to the development
of a Christian morality based on the concept of pleasure, and
repudiates the traditional synthesis of Stoicism and Christianity,
popular among scholastics and humanists alike. The substance of the
dialogue is repeated in a long chapter in his Repastinatio
(Repastinatio, 73–98; 411–418).

Valla’s strategy is to reduce the traditional four virtues—
prudence, justice, fortitude, and propriety (or temperance)—to
fortitude, and then to equate fortitude with charity and love. For
Valla, fortitude is the essential virtue, since it shows that we do
not allow ourselves to be conquered by the wrong emotions, but instead
to act for the good. As a true virtue of action, it is closely
connected to justice and is defined as “a certain resistance
against both the harsh and the pleasant things which prudence has
declared to be evils.” It is the power to tolerate and suffer
adversity and bad luck, but also to resist the blandishments of a
fortune which can be all too good, thus weakening the
spirit. Fortitude is the only true virtue, because virtue resides in
the will, since our actions, to which we assign moral qualifications,
proceed from the will.

Valla’s reductive strategy has a clear aim: to equate this essential
virtue of action, fortitude, with the biblical concept of love and
charity. This step requires some hermeneutic manipulation, but the
Stoic overtones of Cicero’s account in De officiis have
prepared the way for it—ironically, perhaps, in view of
Valla’s professed hostility towards Stoicism—since enduring
hardship with Stoic patience is easily linked to the Pauline message
that we become strong by being tested (II Cor. 12:10, quoted by
Valla). The labor, sweat, and trouble we must bear, though bad in
themselves, “are called good because they lead to that
victory,” Valla writes, echoing St Paul (Repastinatio, 88–89;
415). We do not, then, strive to attain virtue for its own sake, since
it is full of toil and hardship, but rather because it leads us to our
goal. This is one of Valla’s major claims against the Stoics and the
Peripatetics, who—at least in Valla’s interpretation—
regarded virtue as the end of life, that is, the goal which is sought
for its own sake. Because virtuous behavior is difficult, requiring us
to put up with harsh and bitter afflictions, no one naturally and
voluntarily seeks virtue as an end in itself. What we seek is pleasure
or delectation, both in this life and—far more importantly
—in the life to come.

By equating pleasure with love, Valla can argue that it is love or
pleasure that is our ultimate end. This entails the striking notion
that God is not loved for his own sake, but for the sake of love:
“For nothing is loved for its own sake or for the sake of
something else as another end, but the love itself is the end”
(Repastinatio, 417). This is a daring move. Traditionally, God was said
to be loved for his own sake, not for his usefulness in gaining
something else. Many thinkers agreed with Augustine that concupiscent
love was to be distinguished from friendship, and, with respect to
heavenly beatitude, use from fruition. We can love something as a
means to an end (use), and we can love something for its own sake
(fruition). But because Valla has maintained that pleasure is our
highest good, God can only be loved as a means to that end.

It is therefore a moot point whether Valla successfully integrated
Epicurean hedonism with Christian morality. He seems to argue that the
Epicurean position is valid only for the period before the coming of
Christ. In his unredeemed state, man is rightly regarded as a
pleasure-seeking animal, who is governed by self-interest and
utilitarian motives. After Christ’s coming, however, we have a
different picture: repudiating Epicurean pleasure, we should choose
the harsh and difficult life of Christian honestas (virtue)
as a step towards heavenly beatitude. Yet, the two views of man are
not so readily combined. On the one hand, there is the positive
evaluation of pleasure as the fundamental principle in human
psychology—which is confirmed and underscored by the
terminological equation of
voluptas (pleasure), beatitudo (beatitude),
fruitio (fruition), delectatio (delectation), and
amor (love). On the other hand, Valla states apodictically
that there are two pleasures: an earthly one, which is the mother of
vice, and a heavenly one, which is the mother of virtue; that we should
abstain from the former if we want to enjoy the latter; and that the
natural, pre-Christian life is “empty and worthy of
punishment” if not put in the wider perspective of human destiny.
In other words, we are commanded to live the arduous and difficult life
of Christian honestas, ruled by restraint, self-denial, and
propriety (temperance), and, at the same time, to live a hedonist life,
which consists of the joyful, free, and natural gratification of the
senses.

Another of his targets is the Aristotelian account of virtue as a mean
between two extremes. According to Valla, each individual vice is
instead the opposite of an individual virtue. He makes this point by
distinguishing between two different senses of the same virtue,
showing that they have different opposites. So, while Aristotle
regards fortitude as the mean between the vices of rashness and
cowardice, Valla argues that there are two aspects to fortitude:
fighting bravely and being cautious (for instance, in yielding to the
victorious enemy), with cowardice and rashness as their respective
opposites. Likewise, generosity is not the mean between avarice and
prodigality, but has two aspects: giving and not giving. Prodigality
is the opposite of the first aspect, avarice of the second, for which
we should use the term frugality or thrift rather than
generosity. More generally, the terminology of vices as defects and
excesses and virtue as a mean is misleading; virtues and vices should
not be ranked “according to whether they are at the bottom, or
halfway up, or at the top.” Interestingly, a similar critique of
Aristotle’s notion of virtue as a mean between two extremes has been
raised in modern scholarship (for example, by W. D. Ross).

Valla regards the Aristotelian notion of virtue as too static and
inflexible, so that it does not do justice to the impulsive nature of
our moral behavior. For him, virtue is not a habit, as Aristotle
believed, but rather an affect, an emotion or feeling that can be
acquired and lost in a moment’s time. Virtue is the domain solely of
the will. The greatest virtue or the worse vice may arise out of one
single act. And because virtue is painful and vice tempting, one may
easily slide from the one into the other, unlike knowledge, which does
not turn into ignorance all of a sudden. Valla therefore frequently
removes the notions of knowledge, truth, and prudence from the sphere
of moral action. Virtues as affects are located in the rear part of
the soul, the will, while the domains of knowledge, truth, and opinion
reside in the other two faculties, memory and reason (Repastinatio,
73–74). This is not to say that the will is independent from the
intellectual capacities. The affects need reason as their guide, and
the lack of such guidance can result in vice. But Valla is not
entirely clear as to what element we should assign the moral
qualification “good” or “bad.” He identifies
virtues with affects, and says that only these merit praise and blame
(Repastinatio, 74); however, he also writes that the virtues, as
affects, cannot be called good or bad in themselves, but that these
judgments apply only to the will, that is, to the will’s choice. This
is underlined by his remark that virtue resides in the will rather
than in an action (Repastinatio, 77). In his discussion of the soul,
however, he frequently calls reason the will’s guide (e.g., Valla
Repastinatio, 75), and also says that the affects should follow reason, so
that it, too, may be held responsible, in the final analysis, for
moral behavior (even though he also explicitly denies that the will is
determined by reason). Finally, pleasure, delectation, or beatitude
are also called virtue by the equation of virtue with love and with
charity (Repastinatio, 85).

Moreover, Valla’s insistence on the will as the locus of moral
behavior seems compromised by the predestinarianism advocated by the
interlocutor “Lorenzo” in his dialogue De libero
arbitrio (On Free Will). In this highly rhetorical work,
Valla—if we can assume that Lorenzo represents Valla’s own
position—stresses that in his inscrutable wisdom God hardens
the hearts of some, while saving those of others. We do not know why,
and it is presumptuous and vain to inquire into the matter. Yet,
somehow we do have free will, “Now, indeed, He brings no
necessity, and His hardening one and showing another mercy does not
deprive us of free will, since He does this most wisely and in full
holiness” (Valla 1948, 177). So, we are free, after all, and
God’s foreknowledge does not necessitate the future; but how exactly
Valla thinks his views settle these issues is not clear. Even though
the tone of the piece is strongly fideistic, Valla does not shrink
from discussing the issue of God’s providence and free will, just as
he had tried to analyze the Trinity in his
Repastinatio.

In conclusion, Valla’s moral thought can be described—with
some justice—as hedonistic, voluntarist, and perhaps also
empirical (in the sense of taking account of how people actually
behave). On closer inspection, however, his account seems to contain
the seeds of several ideas that are not so easily reconciled with one
another. This is doubtless due, in no small measure, to his
eclecticism, his attempt to bring into one picture Aristotelian
ethics, the Stoic virtues of Cicero, the biblical concepts of charity
and beatitude, and the Epicurean notion of hedonist pleasure—
each with its own distinctive terminology, definitions, and
philosophical context.

Valla’s contributions to historical, classical, and biblical
scholarship are beyond doubt, and helped to pave the way for the
critical textual philology of Poliziano, Erasmus, and later generations
of humanists. Valla grasped the important insight—which was not
unknown to medieval scholars—that the meaning of a text can be
understood only when it is seen as the product of its original
historical and cultural context. Yet his attempt to reform or transform
the scholastic study of language and argumentation—and, indeed,
their entire mode of doing philosophy—is likely to be met with
skepticism or even hostility by the historian of medieval philosophy
who is dedicated to the argumentative rigor and conceptual analysis
which are the hallmarks of scholastic thought. Nevertheless, while it
may be true that Valla’s individual arguments are sometimes weak,
superficial, and unfair, his critique as a whole does have an important
philosophical and historical significance. The following two points, in
particular, should be mentioned.

First, the humanist study of Stoicism, Epicureanism, skepticism, and
Neoplatonism widened the philosophical horizon and eroded faith in the
universal truth of Aristotelian philosophy—an essential
preparatory stage for the rise of early modern thought. In Valla’s
day, Aristotle was still “the Philosopher,” and
scholastics put considerable effort into explaining his words. Valla
attacks what he sees as the ipse dixit attitude of the
scholastics. For him, a true philosopher does not follow a single
master but instead says whatever he thinks. Referring to Pythagoras’
modest claim that he was a not a wise man but a lover of wisdom
(Repastinatio, 1), Valla maintains that he does not belong to
any sect (including that of the skeptics) and wants to retain his
independence as critical thinker. What the scholastics forget, he
thinks, is that there were many alternatives in antiquity to the
supposedly great master, many sects, and many other types of
philosopher. In criticizing Aristotle’s natural philosophy, for
instance, he gave vent to a sentiment which ultimately eroded faith in
the Aristotelian system. Valla rightly saw that Aristotle’s
conclusions were not in line with everyday observations. This does
not, however, mean that he was developing a non-Aristotelian natural
philosophy; his rejection of Aristotle’s account of nature was
primarily motivated by religious and linguistic
considerations. Indeed, Valla’s insistence on common linguistic usage,
combined with his appeal to common sense and his religious fervor,
seems at times to foster a fideism that is at odds with an exploratory
attitude towards the natural world. But with hindsight we can say
that any undermining of the faith in the exclusiveness of the
scholastic-Aristotelian worldview contributed to its demise and,
ultimately, to its replacement by a different, mechanistic one. And
although the humanist polemic was only one factor among many others,
its role in this process was by no means negligible. Likewise, in
attacking Peripatetic moral philosophy, Valla showed that there were
alternatives to the Aristotelian paradigm, even though his use of
Epicureanism and Stoicism was rhetorical rather than historical.

The second point relates to the previous one. In placing himself in
opposition to what he regarded as the Aristotelian paradigm, Valla
often interprets certain doctrines—the syllogism, hypothetical
syllogism, modal propositions, and the square of contraries—in
ways they were not designed for. In such cases, we can see Valla
starting, as it were, from the inside of the Aristotelian paradigm,
from some basic assumptions and ideas of his opponents, in order to
refute them by using a kind of reductio ad absurdum or
submitting them to his own criteria, which are external to the
paradigm. This moving inside and outside of the Aristotelian paradigm
can explain (and perhaps excuse) Valla’s inconsistency, for it is an
inconsistency which is closely tied to his tactics and his agenda. He
does not want to be consistent if this means merely obeying the rules
of the scholastics, which in his view amounted to rigorously defining
one’s terms and pressing these into the straightjacket of a
syllogistic argument, no matter what common sense and linguistic
custom teach us. Behind this inconsistency, therefore, lies a
consistent program of replacing philosophical speculation and
theorizing with an approach based on common linguistic practice and
common sense. But arguably it has also philosophical relevance; for
throughout the history of philosophy a warning can be heard against
abstraction, speculation, and formalization. One need not endorse this
cautionary note in order to see that philosophy thrives on the
creative tension between, on the one hand, a tendency to abstract,
speculate, and formalize, and, on the other, a concern that the object
of philosophical analysis should not be lost from sight, that
philosophy should not become a game of its own—an abstract and
theoretical affair that leaves the world it purports to analyze and
explain far behind, using a language that can be understood only by
its own practitioners.

The 1962 reprint of Valla’s Opera omnia, contains his most
important writings. A new critical edition of his complete works was
launched in 2007: “Edizione Nazionale delle opere di Lorenzo
Valla” (Florence: Polistampa). Several volumes have now
appeared.

Gray, H., 1965. “Valla’s Encomium of St. Thomas
Aquinas and the Humanist Conception of Christian
Antiquity,” in H. Bluhm (ed.), Essays in History and
Literature presented by Fellows of the Newberry Library to Stanley
Pargellis, Chicago: Newberry Library, 37–51.

–––, 1996. “Lorenzo Valla on the Problem
of Speaking about the Trinity,” Journal of the History of
Ideas, 57: 27–53; repr. in C. Trinkaus, Renaissance
Transformation of Late Medieval Thought, Aldershot: Variorum, 1999.